Tag: graphic reportage

Last weekend, the Lisboa Makeup School students had their final course exam. Nine talented girls led by the amazing makeup artist Miguel Molena spent the whole Sunday working their way into the makeup world in a basement of an office building in the central Avenida da Liberdade.

Blu Models provided nine female models, one for each student. All spent a good part of the morning designing and executing a natural makeup look. Miguel would come in the end to evaluate and make small corrections.

As soon as everyone was ready, the models were dressed by the stylists and had their hair done by Miguel. Outside, in the Avenida, photographers Patrícia and Pietá led the models to a casual street environment photoshoot, to test the pictorial quality of the students’ work.

The top terrace of the building provided the perfect spot (if a little cold) for the second photoshoot. The backstreets of the Santana hill and the abandoned look of the terrace accented the edginess of the models’ look.

During the festivities of the Santos Populares, the districts of the old town of Lisboa get swarmed by hundreds of thousands of people, relishing on cheesy music, beer, bifanas and the traditional sardinhadas (the act of grilling sardines) that announce Summer as swallows do Spring.

In the heart of Mouraria, the residents of one particular building held a solidarity sardinhada to raise awareness to their dramatic situation. All 16 families living there were given an eviction order by the newly anointed landlord, who wants to capitalize the building as an investment product. While the city hall is moving to improve local infrastructures, few policies seem to prevent the current residents of the old districts of Lisboa from being evicted with little chance of retaining their homes or procuring a reasonably priced alternative, and so, any improvements in the area benefit investors alone.

While these residents are more outspoken in their protest – the action attracted the attention of a french camera crew and a few local politicians – their struggle is by far not unique, as the same kind of takeover is happening all around the city, in old and new districts alike. The dramatic result is that housing prices for purchase and rental are skyrocketing all around, becoming inaccessible to the local populations, especially for those who, like the tenants of the Rua dos Lagares 25, have lived their whole lives in the old town of Lisboa.

The past Wednesday, I had my first class as instructor in the Urban Sketchers 10 Years x 10 Classes programme in Lisboa. All classes are focused on graphic reportage and storytelling, and we will be approaching subjects on three different scales. We’ll learn how to handle and tell little, medium and big stories about the places where we live.

In my little stories class, we focused on city objects that you don’t really notice they’re there, but can be very important to your safety, comfort or enjoyment – public realm objects. We learned how to harvest an interesting story out of the most mundane and unnoticed objects in our city. After all, is there a better way of becoming a good storyteller than to turn a dull subject into a fascinating report? We also practiced how to properly balance title, text and figure in the same sketch. Finally, we challenged each other as we pitched our story out loud to all of our colleagues.

In the first exercise, we sketched a city view, filtering out everything that wasn’t a public realm object. Here, critical reasoning was fundamental, as we could include or exclude objects based on our own opinion. After all, it’s our sketchbook, we cry if we want to. We wrapped it up by attributing a verb to each object.

In the second challenge, we chose one of the objects, sketch it from several viewpoints when necessary, and take plenty of notes about it – facts only, or questions about facts that we’d like cleared. Then, in one minute, we pitched our sketch to everybody.

Finally, we approached the story full-on, relating the object to the people around it, or the people that interact with it, or even the people that walk past it and simply ignore it. Sketching a bit of the context, if necessary, we told
the human story of the chosen object. We wrapped it up with a 30-second pitch, because Ginjinha was calling from across the square.

After a tour of the DN headquarter offices and a brief introduction on how to compose a news report by reporter Marina Almeida, Mário, who’d previously asked everyone to bring a small object that was dear to each participant, challenged the class to sketch their own object and write a small text that would reveal their relationship with that object. Then they got to choose their favorite amongst the other objects to compose straightforward unattached sketch and text, showing a bit of the office context in the process.

In the historical medieval city of Évora, national-wide veterinarians, as well as suppliers and consumers of the farm animal industry gathered for a full weekend of lectures, discussions and get-togethers in a local hotel.

The organization and its sponsors commissioned a sketched reportage of the event and its participants. All of the speakers had their portrait done while they were giving their lectures.